What does Business Architecture Mean for You?

Author(s)

Editor & Founder, BPMInstitute.org, BAInstitute.org and DBIZInstitute.org
With over 25 years experience building and creating professional communities, Gregg Rock is recognized as an industry leader in professional training and education vital to helping enterprise organizations support their transformation initiatives. His work has been recognized in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune Magazine, Financial Times, CIO Magazine, and New York Times. Throughout his career Gregg has developed communities, hosted executive networking forums and the formation of advisory boards on topics ranging from IT security and outsourcing to multimedia and Y2K, but is most widely associated with his accomplishments in the areas of Business Process Management (BPM), Digital Business (DBiz), Business Architecture (BA), and Cloud Computing. BPM in particular is a widely accepted approach for designing enterprise organizational and information systems. This focus on process-related skills is creating demand for BPM content, collaboration, and training resources by corporations—a niche Gregg has spent years to fill. In 1997, Gregg founded BrainStorm Group and the network of BrainStorm Communities, consisting of discipline-specific web portals for BPM, BA, and SOA practitioners to network and receive education, professional training online and through live in-person events. This has enabled over 100,000 practitioners from over 125 countries to collaborate and share best practices, online and face-to-face. BrainStorm Communities feature a comprehensive suite of member services including newsletters, discussion groups, blogs, virtual and live events, live and online training, certificate programs, and professional certification. During his tenure, Gregg has produced more than 100 industry events in North America, South America, EMEA, and Australia attended by over 300,000 professionals. He led the development of the Certified Business Process Management Professional program. Harnessing the collective intelligence of leading BPM subject matter experts, this certification establishes an objective evaluation of a BPM professional’s knowledge, skill, and ability. He recently led the launch of BrainStorm's newest Community, focused on Digital Business and Transformation - DBizInstitute.org. Gregg also earned his private pilot license in 1991 and remains an active member of Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA). When not flying, he’s active in his community and enjoys coaching little league, soccer, and lacrosse for his children.
Director of Operations and Strategic Initiatives, Leidos
Simona Lovin is a seasoned business and IT executive, currently driving strategic initiatives in Leidos' Government Health group. Previously, she led operations for Cognosante's portfolio of Veterans Affairs engagements. Her diverse and successful background in business development, delivery management and enterprise architecture gives her a unique perspective on blending architectural theory and practice to generate sustainable results. For the past twenty years, Simona has focused primarily on the delivery of strategic planning, business architecture and enterprise architecture consulting services for major governmental and commercial organizations. Simona led and strengthened the Enterprise Architecture practices for the World Bank/International Finance Corporation; Vangent, Inc.’s Health Division; and PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Public Sector line of business. Her overall sector expertise includes government, healthcare, international development, investment services, higher education, and telecommunications. Simona holds a Master of Business Administration from the Heriot-Watt University, the Edinburgh School of Business, and a Master of Science in Computer Science from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania.

GR: What originally attracted you to the Business Architecture discipline, and what does Business Architecture mean for you?

SL: Well Gregg, to me gravitating towards Business Architecture has really been a natural evolution. My career started with an education in computer science, followed by a few years of software development, and from there I quickly realized that analyzing and distilling the customers requirements was a lot more interesting than coding the spec. And then, moreover, understanding the why behind the requirements, and that the needs that drove the requirements was even more interesting. Being able to correlate those needs with the customers business mission, business processes, supporting system, and data architecture while having that bird’s eye view of the whole texture of the organization was extremely compelling.

My professional formation followed my interests. From software development I moved into requirements analysis, system analysis, system engineering, and from there into enterprise architecture, and then into Business Architecture.

Now, in parallel, my management responsibilities have also grown where these days, my primary focus is really on outcomes, on the delivery of services and solutions, on people, on customers, on financials. Now, these elements, people, products, budgets, and customers, they’re also part of an organization’s Business Architecture. When you look at it from this point of view, I really use Business Architecture techniques almost every day, and most people in my role do without knowing that they are Business Architecture techniques.

For example, to understand my customers, I need to learn their business, I need to understand their vision, their strategy, their value chain, and their business processes so that I can then locate the gaps or the areas of weakness in their business and in their architecture. Find where do the problems lie. Do they lie at the boundary between processes? Are they related to the movement of data through the enterprise? Or in the lack of automation? Or, maybe, it’s the human factor, maybe there’s lack of expertise, or lack of obsolete skill sets, or suboptimal organizational structures.

That’s my focus these days and even though I don’t do consulting and Business Architecture directly anymore, I actually use quite a number of techniques that are rooted in Business Architecture.

GR: That’s fantastic. I think when it comes to skills development in this area, I know a lot of what you picked up along the way was on the job training and learning about Business Architecture on the fly.

As you know, The Institute has had an established curriculum in that area for quite some time and for folks that are interested in getting up to speed in Business Architecture quickly, they can take a look at that on the website. We have individual courses and certificate programs, as well as a Business Architecture certification. The Institute is doing what we can to help both individuals and organizations looking to adopt Business Architecture.

Editor’s Note: This is a five-part article and video series.

Watch the entire Top 5 Things to Know About Business Architecture video series

Read the other articles in the series here:

Article 2: Do Organizations Understand the Value of Business Architecture?

Article 3: What will Raise the Profile of the Business Architecture Discipline?

Article 4: When does Business Architecture Make a Difference?

Article 5: What does the Future Hold for Business Architecture?

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